Not really, no. Fascism likes to regulate. There hasn't been one fascist regime where capitalism was allowed to roam entirely free.

See my previous post about the Reichskommissar.

So our communist friend rants against fascism and capitalism, while he obviously doesnt even know what he is ranting again, and that there are and what actually are the differences between them. Hmmm...

(19-03-2017 09:47 AM)Deesse23 Wrote: Fred is entitled to admire Mao, one of the biggest bringers of misery to humanity, and i am entitled to find that repulsive.

I don't especially admire Mao, but realistically, as much misery as he brought, he displaced and replaced a system which was also bringing huge misery to most of the Chinese population, and holding them back from any hope of improvement. The country was basically being run be warlords, it had no international standing, its resources were being pillaged by foreign powers, and it was invaded and occupied by the Japanese, who massacred great numbers of Chinese.

Mao managed to unify the country, get rid of the foreign exploiters, and bring the country into the 20th century as a world power. Granted, he did it at the cost of millions of lives, but it's arguable that if China had kept on going the way it was without Mao's revolution, millions of lives would have been lost, regardless.

This isn't quite like saying "well, Il Duce did make the trains run on time", but history does require some perspective . . .

Wrong dichotomy fallacy? Maybe there was a third option other than

keeping China being the shithole it was

Have Mao kill dozens of millions of people for a "good cause"

A propos "good cause": Ever heared of the "great firewall"? I did just a few years ago and first thought that guy was trolling me. What happens when i type "www.google.com" from a PC in China?

I appreciate however that you agree with me that Mao is responsible for all this suffering which Fredo seems to be completely oblivious to.

(20-03-2017 07:30 PM)Dr H Wrote: I would say that's a misinterpretation based on a bit of "salting the mine", as it were. I've know a few pretty vehement communists, but none who ever asserted they expected to achieve "paradise on earth".

They wouldn't call it such but how much communism differs from paradise? It was always in future too, just like one in traditional religions.

Quote:If one is willing to stretch the definitions of a whole handful of terms to this extent, one could also argue that democracy, republicanism, environmentalism, veganism, and a whole host of other "isms" are also religions. Although none are generally considered to be such.

Stretch the definitions, sure. Reverence in which Lenin was held means nothing, same with Stalin cult. Party looking for heretics and creating accepted cannon of it's history [History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks): Short Course] stretching the definition too I guess.

Quote:To convince me, it would first have to convince me that there were mystical elements to Marxism -- Engles coming back from the dead on Mayday; Lenin walking on water; proletariats each getting 72 virgins in the afterlife; or at least Gus Hall's face appearing on my next taco -- something like that.

You do realize that no every definition of religion speaks about something mystical element? Look at Frazer one: Religion is a belief in powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature of human life and remember m-l laws of history.

You take most primitive of fables and judge something to not be religion cause it was slightly less stupid.

Quote:Exactly.

However, one can conceive of less extreme examples that would still illustrate the point.

If one is against idea that m-l was religion from the start then one certainly can. This does not mean that such examples would be convincing.

Quote:Perhaps what I need to see is your working definition of "religion".

In shorter words it could be definition wrote by Włodzimierz Pawluczuk - "religion constitutes such form of cohabitation among people, in which they found in fair way road to salvation". May be somewhat clunky sounding in English.

Quote:By that reasoning, virtually every war is a religious war.

No.

Quote:Do you honestly believe that?

I think that you just can't accept that m-l could be religion so you generously throw reductios ad absurdum around. Like the one above.

Quote:A fair point; thanks for bringing it out.

I will say, though, that my apologist made no distinction between m-l and communism -- to him, they were different names for the same thing.
Nor is he untutored or provincial -- he lived for 4 years in the Soviet Union, and spend at least a dozen traveling in China, and just earned a Ph.D. last year from Oxford University College of Theology and Religion.

None of which necessarily makes him right, of course, but he has less reason to be wrong than most.

And in this regard he wasn't.

The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

(20-03-2017 10:05 PM)Full Circle Wrote: I am a pragmatist and a realist so I see the world as it is and not as a definition.
The concept of communism is at best a fanciful dream and at worst a convenient vehicle to fool the masses and concentrate all the power and wealth on a few, thus an oligarchy. A billionaire in a capitalist society is but an insignificant speck compared to the power and wealth that men such as Mao, Stalin and Castro have wielded through fear and oppression.

You seem to embrace the definition without examining the reality. Communism is a failed concept, not because it doesn’t have altruistic merit, but because it fails to take into consideration the human traits we all possess.

Communism will always be nothing more than an unworkable pipe dream of the idealists.

Really? Stalin, Mao, and Castro didn't have a billion $ between them. Castro road around in a military truck from the '80s. The many billionaires in our world wield massive power.

I see that your style of discussion is very much like Putin’s and now Trump’s; and that is the old schoolyard trick of not directly addressing the points being made.

Not sure if you don’t understand them or are ignoring them.

“I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s.”~Mark Twain
“Ocean: A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man - who has no gills.”~ Ambrose Bierce

I am a pragmatist and a realist so I see the world as it is and not as a definition.
The concept of communism is at best a fanciful dream and at worst a convenient vehicle to fool the masses and concentrate all the power and wealth on a few, thus an oligarchy. A billionaire in a capitalist society is but an insignificant speck compared to the power and wealth that men such as Mao, Stalin and Castro have wielded through fear and oppression.

I would be wary of confusing authoritarian dictatorship with "communism".

Quote:You seem to embrace the definition without examining the reality. Communism is a failed concept, not because it doesn’t have altruistic merit, but because it fails to take into consideration the human traits we all possess.

Well, at least part of the reason it failed in application is that it was violently opposed at every turn, by the US and other well-heeled western powers who were scared to death of it. Many of the brutal thugs the US propped up for decades were supported primarily because of their opposition to communism.

Quote:Communism will always be nothing more than an unworkable pipe dream of the idealists.

One could say the same thing of democracy, were one of pessimistic bent.

Are you unaware that there is more to psychology than the psychiatric care of the profoundly mentally ill? That we have learned more about how the brain functions in the past 20 years, than in the past 2000? You do know that we're no longer drilling holes in people's skulls to let out the evil spirits, right?

(20-03-2017 10:39 PM)Fred Hampton Wrote: I actually don't think anyone else here is that interested in so-comm or Mao, other than to lambast him as much as possible. Thats my take. I just as well be talking about:

(21-03-2017 02:30 AM)Deesse23 Wrote: A propos "good cause": Ever heared of the "great firewall"? I did just a few years ago and first thought that guy was trolling me. What happens when i type "www.google.com" from a PC in China?

Sure, but you can't exactly blame that one on Mao -- he'd been dead nearly a decade and a half before the internet went public.

Quote:I appreciate however that you agree with me that Mao is responsible for all this suffering which Fredo seems to be completely oblivious to.

Of course. I don't like dictators. No matter how noble they believe their motives to be, they always end up causing at least as much harm as good, and usually a good deal more. The very act of assuming control over another person is most often a form of violence in itself, and dictators are all about control.